Haint Blue

Pawley’s Island in the off-season was unexpectedly gloomy.

When Danielle had booked her vacation, she’d been guided by the lure of photos of vacation homes combined with a price that seemed too good to be true. Turns out, she should have paid attention to the “too good to be true” part. Instead of the sunny vistas shown in the photos on the website, the ocean and sky were slate grey. The South Carolina coast in the depths of winter was not a paradise. The water was cold, the air had more chill than she had hoped, but the locals were nice. Her cottage by the ocean also lived up to the interior shots, and she loved the cute sky blue accents it had around the door jambs and windows.

She’d gotten into a comfortable routine in her little cottage after only three days. She’d wake up around dawn, go for a run along the beach, and wave to the nice man she always passed. He was a strange fellow, dressed in drab gray to match the weather, and never spoke a word. He’d scared her the first day, popping up out of seemingly nowhere.

It was time to go for groceries and Danielle decided to take in some of the local color. There was a small Mom and Pop place not far from her rental. As she perused aisles full of both essentials and local goods, she filled her basket with glee. Shopping was one of Danielle’s favorite pastimes. So avid was her attention that she didn’t notice the man in her path.

“Whoa!”

The can of tomato paste she held went flying over her shoulder, and the sound of it smacking against the tile made Danielle cringe. “I’m so sorry!” she cried.

“You’re okay!” the man said, holding his hands up palms out. “I didn’t mean to scare you!”

“I should have been paying attention,” she said, shaking her head and turning back to the clerk. “I’ll pay for that.”

The clerk looked up, friendly brown eyes dancing in his dark face. “It’s not a problem, ma’am. Here you go,” he answered, his voice carrying a lilt that was familiar to Danielle. She’d heard a similar accent when she’d gone to the Bahamas.

Carefully putting the beat up can back into her cart, she turned back to the stranger in front of her. His face was only lightly lined, but grey was starting at his temples. He held out a hand. “I’m Jim Sheldon.”

“Danielle Morris,” she replied, taking his hand.

He nodded to her. “Would you like to have dinner tonight?”

Danielle blinked rapidly. It was a very forward invitation, but hey, a handsome man was interested in her. “Uh . . . sure!”

He relayed where they would meet for dinner and drinks. The rest of her shopping trip was spent with a giant smile as she mentally catalogued what she had brought with her and what she’d need to hit another store for. When she reached the check out register, the young clerk that had helped her in the aisle was there. “Hey!” she said, smiling.

He returned it. “Hi! Find everything you need?”

“Yes, thank you!” She watched him ringing up several items before deciding to ask him about the man on the beach. If he was a local, she assumed he might be well known. “Hey, can I ask you a weird question?”

The young man looked up at her, his eyes slightly narrowed. “Depends.”

She tried to give a reassuring smile. “I was going to ask if you knew about a weird guy who wears all gray walking on the beach.”

This time, the young man’s face twisted. “You said all gray?”

She nodded. “Yeah. I wave to him every day, but whenever I try to come up to him to say hi, I can never catch up to him.”

By this time another clerk had walked up, a young woman with deep brown hair and pale skin. “No way! It’s not storm season!”

“That’s what I’m sayin!” the young man replied to her. “Why the Grey Man walkin’ this time of year?”

“Whoa,” Danielle finally interjected. “Who the heck is the Grey Man?”

The two younger people shared a look. “He’s a ghost,” the girl finally blurted. “Legend goes that a guy was on his way to visit his fiancé when he got caught in one of the marshes and died. Everyone around here believes that if you see the Grey Man, he’ll protect either you or your house in the coming storm.”

Danielle opened her mouth, but to say what? She didn’t believe in ghosts and paranormal crap like that. Obviously it was just some guy who preferred to wear grey, and he was probably a tourist. “Um, okay, thanks. How much do I owe you?”

____________________________________________________

Her date turned out well. She really felt like she and Jim had hit it off beautifully, and the pinnacle of the whole thing was walking along the beach, holding hands in the moonlight. The dreary clouds had cleared just before night fell, and the moon shone bright in the soft darkness. Danielle loved it.

As their walk wound down, they approached her little cottage on the beach. “Would you like to come in?” she asked with a smile.

Jim glanced over at her house, and a strange look passed through his eyes. He looked back at her and smiled. “I can’t tonight. But thank you for the invitation.”

They said goodnight then, Danielle giving Jim a chaste kiss on the cheek before she walked up onto the deck. She waved one last time before opening her door. Her smile stayed plastered across her face as she got ready for bed.

After their second date, they made arrangements to go up to Charleston together. Their third date found them laying out on the beach in front of her rental, taking in the sunset. Danielle was sleepily leaning against Jim’s shoulder. “That soup you made was excellent,” she said. “This is heaven.”

He chuckled.

Time seemed to lengthen, and Danielle realized that she was drifting off to sleep. She tried not to, but as she watched the sun sink beyond the horizon, her eyes drifted shut. She knew that she was there in the liminal space between waking and sleeping, but when she tried to move, to return to the waking world, she was paralyzed. Panic welled, and she tried to call out to Jim, tried to move her hand to his. She no longer could feel his warmth along her side, and terror welled when she could feel a weight pressing on her hips.

With a burst of adrenaline, Danielle was finally able to open her eyes. If she could have, she would have screamed.

The face staring down at her wasn’t a face at all.

The eyes were there, white and green, but there was no aquiline nose or full lips. No rosy cheeks or crows feet. No dirty blond hair or bushy eyebrows.

There was no skin at all.

Instead, lip-less teeth smiled at her from behind white tendon and red muscle. Lid-less eyes leered at her, and Danielle felt her gorge rise as she took in the creature’s nakedness. There was not a stitch of clothing on it, just the dark smears of old, dead blood and shiny serous fluid. Blue veins webbed the body, and yellow hunks of fat spotted the upper arms and abdomen. Danielle took in a deep breath, and the metallic scent of dead blood filled her nostrils. The thing leaned over, opening its toothy maw, and breathed in her disgusted exhale.

Inside her mind, Danielle screamed and thrashed against the bonds keeping her still. She desperately tried to move any part of her body but it was as if her nerves were completely divorced from her brain. Nothing would move, and all she could do was stare at the horrid thing sitting on her, breathe in the scent of death and decay -

A cold hand wrapped around the back of her neck.

It was like being touched by a cattle prod. Suddenly, her limbs listened and she managed to shriek as she pushed the creature off of her. Sand went flying out from beneath her scrambling hands and feet as she tried to get to her feet. She heard an outraged howl, but the hand on the back of her neck came back. Without her conscious command, her head turned towards a lump of . . . something on the ground.

Take it.

Danielle didn’t know if it was a voice in her head or just her own instinctive reaction, but she listened. She lunged forward, grabbing the bloody thing, and turned to run back to her cottage. The creature screeched again, reaching out and hooking her shirt. She fell next to the picnic basket that Jim had brought, and felt the thing land on her back. Danielle tried to fight, but strong hands and a heavy body held her down. Suddenly, the hand reappeared, this time holding her wrist, guiding it into the basket, grabbing the salt canister she’d grabbed earlier from her kitchen. The lid was still loose, and when she threw it behind her salt went everywhere.

The weight disappeared from her back as another shriek filled the air. This time it was sound of pain, and Danielle didn’t think twice as she finally jumped up and continued running. Shrieks echoed behind her as her world narrowed to her goal. She leaped up the two stairs to her porch, and crashed through the door. She tripped over the decorative rug on the floor, the bundle of cloth she’d grabbed from the beach going flying into the kitchen as she hit the floor. “No!”

“No!”

She turned back at the echo, and the creature stood just outside the door. It snarled and shrieked, but didn’t take one step past the sky blue door jamb. Using her foot, she kicked the door shut in the thing’s face. “Oh God,” she whispered, “Oh God, oh God, oh God -“

She continued chanting as she finally lurched towards her cellphone - which was dead. “Dammit!” She turned, eyes searching for a land line. No such luck. She whipped around, looking for her charger, when the lights suddenly cut out. She screamed, terror icing her blood. From outside she heard mocking laughter.

She sat down on the floor. The thing hadn’t come in, so maybe it couldn’t. She would examine the why later, what was important now was that she needed to figure out what to do. No one was coming to examine the screaming, because she’d expected to hear sirens by now if one of the neighbors had called the cops. That’s when she remembered that the cottages on either side of her were currently unoccupied. “Dammit,” she muttered, as she looked over to the bundle on the floor.

She licked her lips, reaching out to examine the object in the light streaming through the windows from the waning moon. The inside of it was wet, and it felt like supple leather. She tried to lay it out flat but the bundle was shaped strangely and had weird folds that looked like -

She gagged as she realized what she held in her hands. In her left was a man’s external genitals, and in her right was the skin of a hand, complete with finger nails. She threw the bundle down and only just managed to scramble over to the sink. The delicious soup that she’d consumed only an hour before made a grand reentrance as she gave in to the need to empty her stomach. Once she produced only bile, she slithered down to the floor of the kitchen, letting the cool tile soothe the heat of her cheeks.

She didn’t need to go back to the bundle to know whose face she would find. Jim was nowhere to be seen, and either that thing had gotten him or . . .

That thing was him.

She needed to get out of here. She needed to get to help. She bit her lip, and stood.

And promptly screamed at the face in the window. The thing was floating at least five feet off the ground since the kitchen window did not look out over the porch. The fucking thing could fly.

Despair overwhelmed her again. There was no way that she could get to her car in time if this thing could actually fly. She sat heavily back on the ground, listening as the thing shrieked and howled outside.

____________________________________________________

Danielle thought she was going to lose her mind. Every sound was magnified, every skitter and tap. After a few more shrieks, the thing outside had settled in to taunt her. It whispered horrible things to her - how it would enjoy skinning her while she screamed, how it would consume her flesh in revenge for the pain she had caused it.

At one point, she started laughing manically. The thing outside had a hard time with certain sounds - the hard consonants that needed lips to form were often slurred into other, more ridiculous sounds. She laughed long and hard, and the thing outside laughed with her as tears streamed down her face. She kept praying that someone would help her, someone would come scare the thing away. When she finally screamed it out loud, the thing bellowed back, “Gihe ‘e ‘I skin!”

She looked over at the lump of flesh. Something twisty and horrible took hold in her chest. It wasn’t for any noble or even intelligent reason why she refused. It was pure spite. “You want your skin? Too bad!”

The thing shrieked, and for long moments Danielle spewed every hateful thing she could think of. She raged, pouring out such vitriol that later, she might blush over the things she told the creature to do and with what. Another part of her mind hoped that the screaming would trigger a noise complaint - she didn’t have any close neighbors along the beach, but perhaps across the street there might be someone. Anyone.

After she exhausted herself of screaming, she rose from the ground. She’d effectively proven to herself that the creature couldn’t come in. She was safe as long as she stayed inside. The creature wailed, continuing to scream abuse at her, but she stalked over to her bedroom, and used a towel to wipe as much sand as she could from her feet. Consulting her Apple Watch told her that it was about ten. “Fuck,” she muttered.

Returning to the living room, she laid down on the sofa. The creature had tracked her through the cottage, going to each window. She was no longer concerned about it getting in, but the question remained - should she try to get out? While she had gotten the courage to be sure that she was safe inside, she wasn’t sure what it was that kept that thing out there. Did it have to be invited in? Was the house spelled or something? She didn’t know, and decided that it was her best bet to stay.

She didn’t sleep. Instead, she continued listening to the creature screech. Even as its hissing quieted down a smidge, she could still hear the angry pounding on the siding outside. Finally, at sometime around three in the morning, she drifted into an uneasy doze.

Only to be startled awake a couple of hours later as the door facing the beach was rattled by enraged fists. Danielle jumped up, and faced the thing. It was screaming incoherently, wailing for its skin with renewed vigor. Its eyes blazed with rage . . . and fear.

Behind it, she could see the lightening of the sky.

“Thank God,” she said. “Go away! Just go away!”

The sun finally crested the horizon. The screaming grew worse, horrible, and the stench that wafted up under the door was nauseating. Burning flesh and decaying blood and flames.

Danielle finally turned away.

It was over in minutes, but Danielle found it hard to move. She sat down on the sofa, and didn’t move as the sun rose higher in the sky.

The knock at her front door startled her so badly that she screamed.

“Ma’am?!”

“Coming!” She raced to the door, and wrenched it open.

Two police officers stood on her doorstep, both looking at her like she was insane. “Ma’am? Are you alright?” the white cop asked, his face twisted into a confused mask.

“Oh thank God!” She didn’t think, only grabbed the one nearest her, which turned out to be the black cop. Awkwardly, he returned the embrace, patting her back and crooning.

“What in the hell?”

“Ma’am, I’m Officer Brown, and this is Officer James. We got a call about screaming?” the black cop said. He had the same lilting accent as the young black man at the grocery store. “What’s happened?”

She pulled back, blinking away her tears as best she could. She told them everything. As the words tumbled from her, Officer James began to look more and more skeptical. “Ma’am, I have to ask, how much did you drink last night? Did you consume any other intoxicating substances?”

She took a deep breath. “No. I didn’t drink any alcohol or do any drugs. I’m telling you the truth!”

Officer James sighed. “Can we come in?”

She nodded, moving out of the way, though for some reason she was reluctant to relinquish Officer Brown’s hand. He never indicated that he wanted his hand back. He did try one of the light switches on his way in. “James, she’s right about the electricity.”

The other officer nodded. “Here, you get her to calm down, I’ll go check the lines outside and call the rental agency. This is one of Paradise Estates’s right?”

She nodded and watched him go. She turned back to Officer Brown, who had her sit on the sofa. He glanced over to the ashes on the floor. His jaw worked, and he swallowed before looking back to her. “For what its worth, Ms. Morris, I believe you.”

Danielle gave him a wobbly smile. “You do?”

He nodded. “Down here there are a lot of black folk that are Gullah Geechee. We’ve got our own stories about what goes bump in the night. I didn’t used to believe them, but I’ve been talking to some friends up and down the coast. A lot of spooky shit’s been going on, and I think I know exactly what attacked you last night.”

“What is it?” she breathed.

“It’s called the boo hag.” He wet his lips. “It’s an evil witch that sheds her skin at night and goes looking for victims to ride. She feeds on your life and can be killed by keeping her from getting back in her skin before sunrise. The sun’s light kills her.”

Danielle blinked. “But . . . what kept it . . . her, from getting in here? If she comes in while you’re sleeping why did she have to . . . lure me outside? And why was she playing at being a man?”

“I say she, but I think it could be a he too. Anyway, the boo needs a skin. That’s why you’re not supposed to fight it. Fighting it will cause the boo to take your skin to hide in.”

“So Jim . . . is probably already dead.” Danielle took a shaky breath.

“Yeah,” Officer Brown agreed. “Probably. And as for why she couldn’t get in here.” He gestured with his head to the back door. “That door jamb is painted blue. Haints can’t cross blue, especially that color.”

“Haints?”

He finally smiled at her, showing off charmingly crooked white teeth. “Spirits. Ghosts."

_________________________________________________

Danielle watched the ocean waves, a small smile on her lips. It had been a year since she’d last walked this beach, a year since her entire view of the world had been upended. She fingered the cross at her neck, a gift from her fiancee.

Soon, she would be Mrs. Brown. After getting back to Chicago, she’d managed to get ahold of Officer Brown’s contact information. At first, it had been to thank him for helping her stay sane through the process of making her statement - this time explaining away her paranormal encounter as a prank gone horribly wrong. As time had worn on, their relationship became friendly, then romantic.

As the surf crashed under the dreary sky, she glanced over the beach. Not twenty yards away, a gray figure stood. Danielle smiled at him, and waved.

This time the figure walked closer. The Grey Man stopped now, only a few feet away. Danielle could finally see his face. It was young, handsome, wreathed in an answering smile. He nodded, and passed her by to disappear another few yards down the beach.

Danielle laughed softly, and turned to walk back to her new home. Yes, she felt safer here, where the Grey Man walked and haint blue guarded her sleep.